I am the head of Product Design at Fastly. We updated the design of the page to include text with the proper color contrast to improve accessibility. The colors are all now WCAG AA compliant. Thank you for the feedback.

The 139 contrast errors are all the headers "jshprentz" "12 minutes ago" not having enough contrast.

HN has always had horrible UX and no desire to fix it. This tracks and does not excuse the original site at all.

Is this a cry for help? :)

Designers just want their work to be unique and eye-catching. They don’t care about readability. They care about user remembering that page. If most pages have good contrast, designers will want to use light contrast to stand different. If light contrast would become the norm, they will reinvent hard contrast. It all goes in cycle.

I come the world of video, and old enough to have spent time with graphics for SD. Specifically, NTSC compliant video. Since it was analog, there were severe consequences of color choices. Red was just a solid NO. On an 8-bit 0-255 scale, white was limited to 235, and black was limited to 16. The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this chat, but that limited range has still stuck with me. I never use #000 or #fff and opt for #111 to #eee for my limits. Seems like a decent enough compromise in web graphics.

For some reason, Reader Mode isn't available on all sites. It wasn't available on this one, either.

I guess the litmus test is that it doesn't become inaccessible when infrastructure goes down.

They obviously need to fix the actual problem first, but they only just found out about the new "actual problem". Surely somebody somewhere has actually looked at this status page before now, so this should have been a known issue already.